Be Healthy Boise

February 2

015

| T

he I

nflam

matio

n C

onnectio

n

Tooth T

ruths

Sib

eria

n S

pa

hom

e-sic

k

0608

0910

2 | BE HEALTHY BOISE 2015 | Be HEALTHY Boise W W W.BOISEWEEKLY.COM

W W W.BOISEWEEKLY.COM Be HEALTHY Boise | BE HEALTHY BOISE 2015 | 3


Publisher: Sally [email protected]

Office Manager: Meg [email protected]

EditorialEditor: Zach Hagadone [email protected]

Contributing Writers: Amy Atkins, Harrison Berry,

Zach Hagadone, Jessica Murri, Valentina Vlasova

AdvertisingAdvertising Director: Brad Hoyd

[email protected] Executives:

Jim Klepacki, [email protected] Glenn, [email protected]

Jill Weigel, [email protected] Williams, [email protected]

CreativeArt Director: Kelsey Hawes

[email protected] Designers:

Jenny Bowler, Jeff LoweCover Photography:

Laurie Pearman

CirculationMan About Town: Stan Jackson

[email protected]

Bar Bar Inc. prints 34,000 copies of Be Healthy Boise, which is available free of charge inside the Feb. 18, 2015 edition

of Boise Weekly at more than 1,000 locations, limited to one copy per reader. Additional copies of this edition of Be Healthy

Boise are available at the Boise Weekly offices. No person may, without permission of the publisher, take more than one copy

of each issue.

To contact us: Boise Weekly’s office is located at 523 Broad St., Boise, ID 83702

Phone: 208-344-2055 Fax: 208-342-4733E-mail: [email protected]

www.boiseweekly.comAddress editorial, business and production correspondence to:

Boise Weekly, P.O. Box 1657, Boise, ID 83701

The entire contents and design of Be Healthy Boise are ©2015 by Bar Bar, Inc.

Boise weekly is an independently owned and operated newspaper.

As with all kids, I was lied to by adults—Particularly

about food. I remember hearing the story about my aunt pushing a bean up her nose when

she was young. It grew in there for weeks until one night at dinner, my grand-mother noticed a small green tendril snaking its way out of her daughter’s nostril. My aunt was rushed to the doctor and the bean sprout was painfully removed.

My aunt has neither confirmed nor denied the story but because of other sto-ries—played on a similar theme—I heard throughout my childhood, I tend to think it’s a tall tale. According to my elders, if I ate watermelon seeds, I would grow a watermelon in my stomach. Likewise with apples. And pears. And putting a bean up my nose would result in a head full of leaves and pods.

Suffice to say, none of those warnings were strictly accurate but I never, to this day, consciously ate watermelon, apple or pear seeds. Shoving legumes up my nose was definitely out of the question. The thought of a plant quietly growing in my stomach (or head) was too horrifying to imagine.

As with most lies, however, they contained a seed of truth. We are literally what we eat—though maybe not in the way the adults in my life told me.

In this edition of Be Healthy Boise, we take a look at a range of topics, from dentistry (Page 8) to Siberian cedar barrel treatments (Page 9) to the massive ex-pansion proposed by St. Luke’s Medical Center in Boise (Page 14). Several pieces, however, follow related topics.

On Page 6, we look at the growing body of research that links chronic inflam-mation to a range of common ailments, including cancer and heart disease. Even more interesting is the role that diet plays in lessening—or worsening—inflamma-tion. Studies suggest that the right combination of anti-inflammatory foods like red wine, olive oil and almonds, can even help battle depression.

The relationship between food and mental health is also taken up on Page 10, where we explore the impact of Western food on the bodies and minds of refu-gees. As if leaving behind a home, friends and family wasn’t enough of a shock to the system, refugees are far away from traditional foods and agricultural practices that often kept them healthier than the heavily processed, chemically enhanced fare so prevalent in the Western diet.

Finally, on Page 12, we check in with a group of culinary entrepreneurs who are working together in Boise to provide the kinds of all natural food that could help everybody—no matter where they’re from—live healthier and happier.

Look for our next edition of Be Healthy Boise in October. Until then, be healthy.

Be HEALTHY Boise

You Are What You Eatzach hagadone



The cure for the common hangover

has proved elusive. Some say that the only way to get rid of that persistent headache and knotted stomach is through bed rest and plenty of water. Anti-inflammatories like ibuprofen have also been a mainstay of hangover cures and, in-creasingly, modern science is verifying that feeling sick after a night of hard drinking is a symptom of the body’s autoimmune response.

More and more, medical researchers are link-ing inflammation to the causes of many com-mon illnesses. The same chemicals that make us feel headachy and ill with a cold, or tender after spraining an ankle, may be behind chronic condi-tions like gluten intolerance, rheumatoid arthritis and even depression. What’s more, long-term in-flammation has been tied to some of the biggest killers in America: cancer and heart disease.

“Uncontrolled inflammatory disease of any kind has global effects on health within a body,” said Dr. James Loveless.

Loveless is a Boise rheumatologist who has been in practice for 23 years. In that time, he has seen a revolution in how physicians connect au-toimmune response—our body’s natural reaction to injury and disease—and negative long-term health issues. While tenderness around a burn, or lethargy as the result of illness are perfectly healthy manifestations of that response, condi-tions like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus are ex-amples of it going awry. The trouble is, nobody is certain what causes a good thing like our body’s ability to fight off infection and repair damaged tissue to go bad.

“That’s a Nobel Prize,” Loveless said. “We think of the immune system as being in place to help fight off foreign invaders but in autoimmune diseases, there’s a trigger that kicks off the im-mune system and it attacks one’s own tissues.”

While science has yet to give a definitive an-swer, there are a number of compelling theories including infectious processes and environmental factors (like toxins), allergies, genetics and stress.

All autoimmune responses release chemicals called cytokines into the bloodstream. In suffi-cient quantities or over a long enough period of time, exposure to cytokines can damage tissue, and they’ve been linked to arterial inflammation and hardening, leading to increased risk of coro-nary artery disease, heart attack and stroke.

Cytokines can also cross the blood-brain bar-rier to damage tissues in the brain, leading some researchers to link chronic or off-the-rails inflam-matory response to neurological conditions like depression and anxiety. In 2006, researchers at universities around the world published an article in Molecular Psychiatry, concluding that adding anti-inflammatory agents to antidepressants im-proved patient outcomes and the likelihood of drugs’ effectiveness on a given patient.

According to a 12-year study conducted on almost 45,000 women ages 50-77 and published in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, women whose diets include foods that trigger inflammation (like red meat, sugars, gluten and soy products like margarine), and fewer foods that control in-flammation are at a 41 percent greater risk of be-ing diagnosed with depression. While previous studies concluded that there was a rela-tionship between inflammation and depression, this one concluded that diet plays a significant role in creating the con-ditions in which some psychiatric conditions arise.

The senior author of the study, Harvard Uni-versity professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition Alberto Ascherio, told the Harvard School of Public Health, “From a public health perspective, it is reassuring that what is good for the body is also good for the mind.”

While our understanding of what triggers chronic autoimmune response is incomplete, much more is known about the conditions that aggravate it. Significantly, body fat has been linked to inflammation, and losing 2.2 pounds of fat has been linked to a decrease of 0.13 mil-ligrams per liter of C-reactive protein, according to the American Heart Association. Measures of 1 mg/L of this protein indicates a low risk of car-diovascular disease, while 3 mg/L or higher is as-sociated with a high risk.

Behaviors that reduce body fat and low-fat diets that contain anti-inflammatory agents are associated with lower levels of cytokines in the blood—behaviors like a maintaining a balanced diet and getting enough exercise. More specifi-cally, there are foods that are known to reduce inflammatory responses in humans, including olive oil, red wine and almonds. Foods high in essential fatty acids, like fish and flaxseed oil, also perform this function. Reducing consumption of foods containing gluten, which is found in breads and pastas, as well as saturated and trans fats, and plants in the nightshade family like potatoes

and tomatoes, can also help reduce in-flammation.

According to University of Idaho Associate professor and dietitian Dr. SeAnne Safaii, the so-called “Mediter-ranean diet,” which is high in olive oil and low in gluten, has been related to

improved cardiac outcomes. Tofu, curry, ginger and sweet potatoes—mainstays of diets in many Asian countries—are also linked to longevity and reduced arthritis-related inflammation.

“Of course,” Safaii wrote in an email, “main-taining a healthy weight is also important for re-ducing inflammation from arthritis.”

The Inflammation ConnectionWhat autoimmune response has to do with heart disease and depressionHarrison Berry

“Uncontrolled inflammatory disease of

any kind has global effects on health

within a body,”

Dr. James Loveless

jeffrey C

. Low

e


FEELING GERMY?

www.facebook.com/ACRIdahowww.twitter.com/ACRIdaho


Amy Atkins

Dentistry by the Numbers

Dental care is a huge industry. From

cleanings, maintenance and repair

to cosmetic changes like veneers,

whitening and trends like in Japan,

where young women are paying for

“yaeba” or the cute, imperfect smile

of “snaggletooth,” people are spend-

ing more than ever on dental care.According to a Health Policy Institute study by

the American Dental Association, Americans spent $111 billion on dental care alone in 2012.

We looked at the industry and found that there are as many interesting facts about dentistry as there are smiles in the world. Below, we have a list of 20 you can sink your teeth into:

1 There are 32 teeth in the human mouth. If the estimated 242,470,820 adults in the

United States each had all of their teeth, that would be a total of 775,906,6240 teeth.

2 As of September 2014, Vijay Kumar, of India, holds the Guinness World Record

for the most teeth in a mouth: 37.

3 Ashik Gavei, 17, also of India, had a rare condition that caused the rampant growth

of teeth. In 2014 doctors removed 232 teeth from Gavei’s mouth.

4 The first dentist in recorded history is be-lieved to be an Egyptian who lived in

2600 BC and served his pharaoh as Chief of Phy-sicians and Dentists. An inscription on his tomb is said to describe him as “the greatest of those who deal with teeth.”

5 According to the American Dental Asso-ciation, the Egyptians found ways of re-

lieving toothaches, securing loose teeth and even creating the earliest precursor of today’s dentures.

6 Between 500-300 B.C., Hippocrates and Aristotle wrote about dental practitioners

“using wires to stabilize loose teeth and fractured jaws.”

7 In 1866, Lucy Beaman Hobbs graduated from the Ohio College of Dental Surgery.

She was the first woman to earn a dental degree.

8 In 1997, the FDA approved the erbium YAG laser, the first for use on dentin, to

treat tooth decay.

9 In 2009, shortly after the beginning of the Great Recession, a Harris Interactive/

HealthDay Poll found more than 50 percent of uninsured and 30 percent of insured Americans skipped necessary dental care visits during the past year due to financial burdens. A Gallup-Healthways poll of 355,334 Americans indicated that 34 percent of the population did not visit a dentist that year at all.

10 According to the American Dental Hy-gienist Association, nearly 75 percent of

American adults suffer from various forms of gum disease and don’t know it.

11 The American Academy of Cosmetic Den-tistry estimates that Americans spend

about $2.75 billion each year on cosmetic den-tistry. Two thirds of cosmetic dentistry patients are female and 33 percent are male.

12 The ADA was founded in 1859. It now has around 160,000 members.

13 According to a study by the Henry J. Kai-ser Family Foundation, there were about

201,000 professionally active dentists in the Unit-ed States. Idaho has 913 active dentists.

14 That same study shows the highest num-ber of dentists are in California, which has

31,640; the fewest are in Wyoming: 314.

15 Trident’s famous “4 out of 5 dentists would recommend Trident gum to their

patients who chew gum” campaign began in the mid-’60s.

16 Rapper Lil Jon has a grill made of plati-num and gold worth more that $30,000.

17 Rapper Lil Wayne has diamonds perma-nently embedded in his teeth. His “smile”

is estimated to have cost around $150,000.

18 In 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statis-tics showed dentists make an annual me-

dian salary of $146,340.

19 With undergraduate and doctoral degree studies, it takes about eight years to be-

come a dentist.

20 According to the American Dental Stu-dent Association, the average dental stu-

dent graduates with $241,097 of debt.

20 facts about teeth to chew on


Providers’ Perspective

Siberian Spa

In Russia, “ Siberian Health”

is a synonym for “good

health.” After all, Sibe-

rians have always been

known for their great

health and strong spirit.One of the components of Siberian

health is Siberian cedar. Siberian ce-dar is one of the most beautiful and majestic trees of Siberia. Siberian ce-dar is the king of the taiga—a clean, virgin Siberian forest. Siberian cedar is unique. Its energy and rhythms of life coincide with the energy and rhythm of a healthy human body. If a person is near the cedar, his or her energy starts to balance and improve.

The healing properties of Siberian cedar have long been known in Rus-sia. Russian healers placed patients in a cedar barrel mounted on hot stones, and ancient herbalists were thus able to cure many ailments and illnesses.

To give yourself a Siberian health experience and feel the miraculous properties of the Siberian cedar, you don’t have to go to Siberia. The unique Siberian cedar healing system is now available to Boiseans at Holistic Place.

The Siberian cedar steam herb bar-rel is made of a pollution-free Siberian cedar that is more than 300 years old. The barrel is constructed without using nails, screws, glue or other introduced chemical materials.

How does it work? Steam envelops the body in a small confined space and penetrates deep into the pores of the skin, opening and cleaning them (sweating relieves stress and muscle fa-tigue). Through expanded and cleaned

pores, the body actively absorbs ther-apeutic compounds of herbs. The result: metabolism normalizes, the function of all organs and systems improves, fatigue disappears and fat accumulation slows. The effect of the course of 10 treatments in the Siberian cedar barrel is comparable to a year of treatment with medicinal herbs and tinctures.

Unlike saunas or steam rooms, the procedure in the Siberian cedar barrel is easily tolerated because your head and face remain outside. Therefore, the heat doesn’t affect the vessels in the head, and you can breathe easily without damaging your lungs with hot air.

Here are some of the benefits of Si-berian cedar herb steam barrel treat-ments:

• Weight loss and increased metab-olism.You’ll burn about 1,100 calories every 15 minutes.

• Reduction and eventual removal of cellulite.

• Detoxification. The Siberian cedar barrel process is considered to be three times more effective than regular sau-nas and steam rooms at eliminating heavy metals such as lead, mercury, nickel and cadmium from the body. The barrel helps rid the body of nico-

tine, pesticide residues, petroleum-based toxins and cholesterol, and can strengthen the immune

system; reduce pain and inflammation of arthritis, osteoarthritis and sciatica; improve joint mobility; and help with muscle fatigue and soreness.

Valentina Vlasova, owner of the Holistic Place, is a ThetaHealing ba-sic and advanced DNA healer/teacher.

Siberian Cedar Barrel Spa in Boise

HOLISTIC PLACE Hyde Park 1615 N. 13th

St.,cedar-spirit.com

Laurie

Pearman

Providers’ Perspective


Jessica Murri

Struggling to Stomach America’s Cuisine

Dadiri Nuro was raised in a place

where his family and friends

ate what they grew. Their food

started out as seeds in the palm

of their hands, which were then

planted into rich Somali soil. They

nurtured their gardens, watched

their food grow and picked it

straight from their backyards

when it came time to eat.Boise, Idaho, the place where he lives now, is

not like that.“We did not grow up like this,” Nuro said.

“We grew up in the farm fields.”Nuro was resettled in Boise in 2004, after a

decade of living in a refugee camp. He and his fellow refugees escaped war and a country in a state of unrest. They’re in a safer, calmer place in Boise, but for many of Nuro’s countrymen living in the United States, the change in diet has had dramatic effects.

While working to help refugees resettle in the Treasure Valley, Susan Obasi-Ikeagwu began noticing the consequences of highly-processed American food on African families. She said they wanted to adopt a Western way of living, which meant adopting a Western diet, too, resulting in illnesses like hypertension, obesity and diabetes running rampant.

“I thought, ‘Oh my goodness. These people get here and start eating things that they are not familiar with, that they don’t have back at home,’” Obasi-Ikeagwu said. “People eat more

natural there than in the U.S. The more remote area of Africa, the more natural their food is.”

Suddenly inundated with changes in culture, language, landscape, social standing, family, community and lifestyle, refugees face another change as well: food that sprouts from geneti-cally-modified seeds, grown in soil spiked with fertilizers, harvested from crops sprinkled with pesticides and processed to withstand storage before eating.

What surprised Obasi-Ikeagwu most, though, was that the health changes weren’t all physical.

“People get here and they eat all this kind of food and they add weight, they get depressed, they have mental health issues, and they get on medication upon medication,” she said.

Obasi-Ikeagwu explained the difficulty many refugees face in finding fresh healthy food. Stores like Whole Foods and Natural Grocers are hard for them to get to and can be cost-prohibitive. So to help connect new arrivals with healthier food, Obasi-Ikeagwu and her husband opened a shop in the Boise International Market called Shepherd’s Heart Farm, where they specialize in grass-fed, organic meats.

The issue has layers, though. It’s not only junk food that causes problems for refugees—it’s also a drastic change in lifestyle. Going from a coun-try where infrastructure is limited, people walk much farther in a day and often spend more of their time farming in a field rather than sitting in an office, which can exacerbate bad health.

Then there’s the new level of stress.“Some get so busy because they have to pay

all these bills, something they’re not used to,” Obasi-Ikeagwu said. “When you have all that unordinary pressure, you tend to take to food like, ‘Oh, I’m so depressed right now, just bring on that food, bring on that chocolate.’”

The stress also comes from worry over family and friends left behind in Africa, Nuro added.

“[The refugees] are just sitting at home watching TV, thinking a lot about home, and their blood pressure is going up,” Nuro said. “They go to the doctor and they get the dose [of medication] increasing every month. High blood pressure still there, not going down.”

Americans’ food consumption habits create a built-in trap for newly arrived refugees. Most of them have spent years, even decades, in refu-gee camps where they were given only small ra-tions of mostly non-perishable foods. Coming to America, they’re suddenly surrounded by gigan-tic grocery stores and dozens of fast food chains.

When Somali-born Abdullahi Mohamed ar-rived in Boise in 2013 from a refugee camp in Jordan, his sole food source was just that.

“In the morning, I used to go to Wendy’s, then when I come back for dinner, I used to go to Mc-Donald’s,” Mohamed said. “For four months, I was living like that. Sometimes I was not feel-ing okay but when you are hungry, you will not care. When you have no choice, it will become to you a habit.”

Back in Jordan, the 28-year-old worked as a physician, but his medical credentials didn’t transfer to the United States, so he currently works on an assembly line at Micron while he studies up on the American medical system.

Mohamed moved here with no family, no friends and no cooking skills. He lived with a group of American roommates, but no one in the household shared meals or cooked together. That left Mohamed adjusting to a diet of mostly fast food.

“When you eat fast foods, they only last for a few hours and again you will feel hungry,” he said. “They will not give you much benefit like

U.S. diet takes its toll on refugees


normal foods. I don’t want to make advertisement, but the Wendy’s was a little bit fresher than the McDon-ald’s. When I used to eat from the Wendy’s, I’d feel a little bit good, but when I ate from the McDon-ald’s—no.”

His eating habits only changed when he moved in with other So-malis, who cook and eat dinner to-gether every night.

“I started eating normal food, and I started to feel a big difference than how it was before,” Mohamed said.

He explained that it’s a struggle to get decent food in America for little money. In Jordan, he could get a good meal for a few dollars. Here, that’s not an option.

“It’s different from our country, how our food is,” Mohamed said. “Here, fast food is available and cheap. Mostly, people who come here without family, they get used to eating it like me. I don’t have time to cook and I don’t know how to cook so the best way is to go out and buy some fast food like Mc-Donald’s.”

Mohamed is lucky to have avoid-ed the illnesses facing other Somali refugees in his community. He said he was able to escape the long-term health problems stemming from un-natural foods, but he was sure if he kept eating that way, they would appear with time.

Nuro knows that, too, so as

president of the Somali Bantu Zigua Community here in Boise, he needed a solution to help his fellow Somalis overcome or prevent these illnesses. So he found some land.

Every Saturday and Sunday, Nuro uses two vans to take Somali refugees out to the farm in Eagle. He said that after only a few months, their health began to change.

“They started to go to the doc-tor and the doctor sees the blood pressure is going down. Then they started to lower the dose until some people don’t need medicine any-more,” Nuro said. “The doctors ask, ‘What are you taking? What are you doing differently? What are you eating?’ and they say, ‘Oh, we don’t take anything, we just go to the farm and we can eat fresh food. We’re not eating the store food now. It’s just like what we’re used to.’”

Nuro said a few doctors even came out and visited the farm to see what was causing their patients’ im-provements.

The farm is barren and frost-covered these days, but Nuro uses a greenhouse in West Boise to plant the beginnings of seeds that will turn into the summer’s crops.

Once the farm is in full swing again, a portion of the produce har-vested will be sold at the Farmer’s Market and a portion will be do-nated to the Idaho Food Bank.

“I’m the doctor now,” Nuro said, laughing.

Presented by

JOIN THE

Foundation for Health, Inc.Sponsored by

CHOOSE YOUR

OWN CHALLENGE

A 100 mile tour through

wine country, a scenic

cruise around Lake Lowell,

or a fun family ride through

Canyon County.

Register at www.trhs.org starting 3.1.15

13th ANNUAL

SAT. JUNE 27TH


Jessica Murri

Share the Health

The Missing Link Foods com-

mercial kitchen is a busy

place on a Monday morning. Brett Edgar and his staff of two weave between each other carrying industrial-size cooking sheets, giant metal bowls of steaks and cutting boards as big as welcome mats.

They’re making 680 dinners for cus-tomers all over the Treasure Valley.

Edgar’s business started with cook-ing a few meals a week for his friends. He makes dinners that follow the so-called Paleo Diet, harkening to a hunt-er-gatherer time when humans didn’t eat grains. The meals are gluten-free, made with lean meats, fresh fruits and vegetables, and plenty of herbs and spice.

“I can’t remember not being able to cook,” Edgar said. “My mom would set us on the counter and we’d tell her about our day while she made dinner.”

Edgar’s endeavor quickly grew to a point where he quit his job with Apple and started sharing a commercial kitch-en with Eagle Hills Golf Course. He outgrew that and moved in with MFT BBQ and Vegan—now BBQ4Life—at the Roadway Inn. Now that the Inn is slated for redevelopment, and BBQ4Life has moved to Vista Avenue, he works from a commercial kitchen at Park Center and Broadway.

He makes four evenings-worth of food for two-person and four-person families, for $55 and $99 per week ,respectively. After all the dinners are prepped and packaged, his clients pick them up from four locations around town on Tuesday evenings.

The menu includes dinners like chi-michurri pork tenderloin with chili

dusted sweet potato rounds; tarragon shallot cherry chicken with sesame ginger roasted vegetables; and roasted pork loin and red pepper pumpkin seed pesto with balsamic glazed beets and baby carrots.

Missing Link’s kitchen is big enough that Edgar decided to share the space with other natural food producers. Now the makers of FitFuel Bars and Pega Natural Foods (and up until re-cently, Bucha Brew) also produce there.

“It was a perfect fit,” Edgar said. “We were already working together, and now we can help each other grow.”

Jennifer Ludington’s started FitFuel Bars out of need. She owns A2O Fit-ness and, as a personal trainer, she said she was frustrated when she wanted to recommend a protein bar to her clients.

“There was a void in the market,” Ludington said. “There wasn’t any-thing I could recommend that had good protein and was all natural.”

Like Edgar, she started in her own kitchen. That was four years ago. Now her business has expanded to making as many as 1,000 bars per week, and they’re available in 13 Albertsons loca-tions, as well as yoga studios, the Boise Co-op, and shops in McCall and Sun Valley. FitFuel bars are all-natural, vegan, grain-free, soy-free, sugar-free, GMO-free frozen protein bars which are filling enough to be a meal.

Being able to share the commercial kitchen has helped Ludington grow her business quickly.

“It’s something that’s unique in Boi-se, that we’ve got a little niche market on,” Ludington said. “We all share the same vision on what we believe food should be. Putting healthy things into our body will help us live healthier lives, and that’s the whole goal.”

Jessic

a M

urri



It has been 22 years since the last

major development took place at

the St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center:

a $48 million addition that included

updated patient rooms, a new pedi-

atric unit, birthing suites, intensive

and critical care units, and tech-

nology and equipment upgrades.Today the hospital campus, located in East

Boise, is fully built out. With projections suggest-ing nearly 300,000 more people will be living in the Treasure Valley by 2030, the state’s largest and only Idaho-owned not-for-profit health care system is looking to expand again.

“Expand” might be an understatement.According to the St. Luke’s Master Plan, a new

hospital building on the north side of Bannock and west of Avenue B would stretch all the way to State Street with a new nine-story medical tower rising above the existing tower past its first four floors. The new tower would house inpatient beds on the top five floors, while the bottom four would pro-vide more space to current use, including diagnos-tic and treatment areas.

The hospital’s central plant, built in 1962 and located on the north side of Jefferson Street and east of First Street, would be demolished and a new structure built to the west along with a new park-ing garage, taking up the full block west of First Street between State and Jefferson streets. The ga-rage would be connected to the new tower complex by an outpatient medical office plaza built above—and bridging—First Street.

According to the plan, the buildings at First Street south of State Street would provide a new entrance for doctors and patients.

To the east, across Avenue B, St. Luke’s would build a multi-story medical building on the south

side of Jefferson Street, extending a sky bridge across Avenue B to connect with the main tower.

Rounding out the expansion would be a new shipping and receiving building along the east side of Second Street and yet another medical office building on the south side of Main Street, east of First Street.

Referred to as the “North Solution” in the master plan, St. Luke’s believes its preferred al-ternative—which carries a price tag of between $300 million-$350 million, paid for with bonds, cash and donations—will create a “more com-pact facility and limit sprawl potential.” How-ever, some major changes will occur to the East Boise neighborhood in the way of street closures, building demolition and traffic congestion.

For instance, St. Luke’s wants to close Jef-ferson Street, and its new First Street drop-off would cause more congestion at the intersection of First, State and Fort streets. What’s more, a number of properties will need to be either de-molished or relocated to make way for devel-opment—specifically on the blocks bounded by State and Jefferson streets and First and Second streets, as well as a handful along Second Street between Jefferson and Bannock streets and one on Avenue B near Reserve Street.

Among the 15 buildings in the study area, which includes portions of the original Boise townsite, most are 50 years or older, making them eligible for protection as historic struc-tures. All in, 12 properties could be considered for relocation based on their age, though accord-ing to the master plan, “there is no indication the properties within the study block area were associated with an important person in Boise’s history.” Further, none are known to be built or designed by noted local architects or archi-tectural firms and the styles of the buildings are “modest examples” of Queen Anne, Bungalow and Colonial Revival not uncommon in other Boise neighborhoods.

While a survey of the buildings based on his-

torical significance “did not support the proper-ties as meeting requirements for consideration as historically significant,” a group of stakeholders that includes Preservation Idaho, the Idaho State Historic Preservation Office, Idaho Heritage Trust, National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Boise City Department of Arts and History and Boise Historic Preservation Commission sug-gested moving some of the properties. St. Luke’s identified a hospital-owned property along Ave-nue B between Warm Springs Boulevard and Ban-nock Street where the displaced buildings could be repurposed. However, the relocation plan would require rezoning the area.

The St. Luke’s Master Plan calls for an aggres-sive timeline for the expansion, with demolition of St. Luke’s-owned buildings to the north and west of the existing hospital, as well as construction of a pediatric medical office building on the corner of East Jefferson Street and Avenue B, set to begin in six months and take two years to complete.

The new central plant, parking garage, and shipping and receiving building would all be built in the next one- to three-year period, in-cluding demolition of the current central plant and the vacating of Jefferson Street between Avenue B and First Street. City planners have called on St. Luke’s to work harder to improve connectivity in the wake of proposed street clo-sures, including expanded bike and pedestrian paths in the area, as well as improved signalling and signage.

In three to five years, the hospital aims to construct the new tower and six- to nine-floor medical office building planned to bridge First Street, connecting the garage to the main hospi-tal. In five to seven years, St. Luke’s will undergo a wide ranging, extensive remodel of existing fa-cilities, rounding out the massive project.

Boiseans will have a chance to view and com-ment on the master plan, with hearings—times and dates not yet announced—before the Ada County Highway District and Boise City Council.

What’s Going Up at St. Luke’s?Hint: A lotZach Hagadone

Hummel A

rchit

ects


Documents

Be Healthy Boise